


Dusk Is Always Gray

by lesbeeian



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, i got really emo and sad and so I wrote this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-10
Updated: 2016-10-10
Packaged: 2018-08-20 13:31:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8250808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbeeian/pseuds/lesbeeian
Summary: Emily discovers the voice that comes along with the heart.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I got really sad thinking about Emily using the heart, so I wrote this. Hope people enjoy!

For Emily, dusk had always been about waiting

When she was younger she would wait all day for this moment. Dusk was when her mother came back to her. She would wait, just for the moment when the sky faded to blue and stars and   
then Jessamine would enter her chambers and collapse into bed dramatically. She never failed to tell Emily exactly how her day went and which laws had been talked of and which officials to avoid and which to butter up. She always smelled of ink and books and her fingers were always stained with blue ink. They would often fell asleep next to each other, tired out from the talking and Emily would feel the beat of her mother's heartbeat, steady, always steady. 

A heart.  
The thing in her hand couldn't be a human heart. It was steady too, but a mechanical steady, less like a living thing and more like time itself. Like the world could collapse into the sea, and millions of plagues could spread, but the heart would keep beating. 

She didn't like it. 

She had always heard the rumors of an Outsider. Organs thrown to the rats, scratchings in bone, all given in some hopeless farce to an indifferent god. A cry to the void. 

The Outsider cared nothing for humanity. He threw ripples of power out into the world in the hope that something would break. Or fix. He didn't care which. Just that something changed.

Sometimes Emily could see the appeal. Something about watching your mother die in front of you makes you want to become a force of nature. To throw something at the world to make it see you. But of course being the empress' daughter already made them see you. How could she balance the desire to be seen with the need to disappear? Was there even a way to do that?

But for now it was dusk and here she was again waiting, but now her mother was gone and what she was waiting for was altogether different. She was waiting for a chance. She was waiting for revenge. But tearing apart the world was much harder for former empresses than it was for Gods.

A man in a tailored blue uniform entered her sight. Target spotted.

She pounced down from her perch, slamming her boots into his back. It was hard not to smile when she heard a satisfying crack from the well placed kick. Right as she was about to begin her interrogation, something whispered in the back of her mind.

"When he was younger his brother told him to watch for the whaling boats. That meant Father had come home. Now both Father and Brother are gone, but still the boats pull into the harbor. His nightmares are filled with the songs of whales."

She jerked back. The man was spitting blood on the floor. Red splatter disrupting the pattern of the cobblestone streets.

The voice was so familiar. It had been long. So long since she felt this way. Like everything was crashing in on itself. Like in a matter of two seconds she had been disarmed, laid bare. 

What kind of daughter forgets what her mother's voice sounds like? She had tried for so long to remember the sound of it. The lilt. Anything. 

The voice was so familiar, but alien. As if she had come home from years at sea, only to find the house the same but with strangers living in it. Jessamine had passion, her voice was soft but commanding. This one was cold. Dead.

The man was starting to squirm under her boot. It was that movement that made her finally remember where she was.

The information was easy to obtain. He was an easily scared man. They usually were. Guards were brawny, but that did not often extend to their strength of will.

Fear was an easy emotion to inspire in people. It was simple. 

Dusk had now passed. The streets were mostly empty, with the exception of a few shady characters and shopkeepers closing up. Emily felt her coat pocket. The heart still lay there, beating, with what felt like was in time with her own heart. She took it out, hands shaking and pointed it at one of the shopkeepers below.

"His father would carve words into bone as he watched. He always knew he would become a butcher."

The whispering voice in the back of her head. It had been years, but she knew it like her own. The call of the void had the voice of her mother.

And she hated it.

People disappeared all the time in Dunwall, they disappeared all the time in Karnaca. Emily knew well that people were easy to make disappear. But memories were harder. And just like fear, memories were easy to make. Emily had some memories that she wanted to forget more than anything else.

She pointed the heart at a women in an alley.

"She was the only one of her family to survive the plague. She was the first one to get it."

She took off running. It took her an hour to get back to her father. He was sitting at his writing desk, in a room so dark she could barely see the streaks of gray in his hair. In the dark she can forget her father's age, forget his history. He has told her, many times over of the blood on his hands. He has memories of his own.

"Corvo" she says and with shaking hands points the heart in his direction. He looks up.

"The sky was grey when the empress was killed. He held her body as she died and the sky was grey. I remember his hands. I remember the sky. He doesn't look at the sky anymore. Corvo my love, you used to look at the sky."

Her father noticed the object in her hands. He was the only one who had. She had walked around full crowds holding the heart before and no one had noticed, but her father did. Emily had seen many suffering people's faces, but the look on his face was something else entirely. He had the look of the void on his face. The desire to disappear.

She walked over to him. He smelled of ink and books. His fingers were stained blue. Together, they walked to the window and looked out at the sky. It was not dusk. It was midnight. And as the city went to sleep, two assassins looked out at the sky and remembered. 

The heart in Emily's hand was set down on the desk. It carried memories of its own.


End file.
